Abstract
Despite enormous contribution to human wellbeing, business is deeply implicated in detrimental changes to planetary systems and an inattention to important human needs. This is unsustainable, a fact recognised by many practitioners. However, they commonly struggle to enact ‘sustainable change’ in business practice. I suggest that a basic ambiguity of objective, narrow frame of reference, adversarial external view, functional isolation and unsuitable performance standards pose five obstacles to such change. I argue that these obstacles are rooted in a paradigm of business abstracted from its social, environmental and ethical context, and that this abstraction is reinforced by dominant currents in the literatures of ‘business and society’ and ‘strategy and innovation’.
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Wallis, J. (2020). Obstacles to Sustainable Change in Business Practice. In: Zsolnai, L., Thompson, M. (eds) Responsible Research for Better Business. Palgrave Studies in Sustainable Business In Association with Future Earth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37810-3_10
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